When I changed jobs two years ago, I shared two articles about my experience in finding a job in Washington (portal: "A brief talk on job hunting experience in the Greater Washington area", "A short talk on job hunting experience in the Greater Washington area 2-Four years later"), this time the scope has been expanded to the entire United States, which is a big leap. I have a lot of experience to share with you. I have written two articles before. Interested students can read:

• 《The recruitment process of American IT companies and what is worth learning from domestically》
• 《Recruiter is the face of the company – share some weird experiences》

This article only focuses on software engineering jobs in the United States.

job market

In recent years, the job market for seniors has been getting better and better, while the market for juniors and new grads has been getting worse and worse. I personally think this is related to the increasing competition in the entire market. More and more companies need labor that can be exported immediately to promote corporate development. To put it bluntly, it is becoming more and more utilitarian.

For people with several years of work experience, finding a job is basically not a problem. After turning on LinkedIn's availability, there will be many recruiters teasing you from LinkedIn every day. This time, I planned to use those who flirted with me as a practice, and then submitted my resume to a big company, but I was picked up before I could submit my resume.

Find a job efficiently

As mentioned before, the market is in short supply, so the most efficient way is to use LinkedIn to passively search for jobs. Now LinkedIn has a function that allows recruiters to know that you are open to new opportunities. Just set your profile, the title of the job you want to find, and the region.

Of course, when looking for a development-related job, it is essential to brush up on the questions. As a senior engineer, I should have brushed up on some before. It is not difficult to pick up. Basically, I sorted out the previous knowledge points, and then became familiar with some unique and key questions. This time I prepared for about a month and answered about 200 questions.

Of course, if you have a dream company that you particularly want to go to, you need to prepare more and take longer. After all, you don’t know what the other party will meet, and it will be a disaster if you don’t know.

But if you don’t have a specific goal, I personally think that it’s enough to understand various algorithms. If you encounter something particularly special, it can only be said to be bad luck. When there are many interview opportunities, you won’t always have bad luck. Moreover, the Chinese also have a secret weapon called facial sutra. kindness….

The following is a list of knowledge I compiled:

• Binary tree fancy traversal, peak and valley problems and other applications
• BFS/DFS processing graph
• DFS finds combinations, permutations and optimal solutions
• Classic solutions such as combination and permutation
• divide and conquer
• Dynamic programming – classic problem types such as the knapsack problem
• Classic system design (SQL/NoSQL database, how to shard, consistent hash, etc., some classic system designs)

For senior students, system design needs to be well prepared. The companies I interviewed this time basically asked about system design, and the questions were very detailed. If you are not prepared or have not done it, you will basically fail.

time schedule

The timeline is relatively simple. The main thing is to answer the questions. After completing the questions, you will receive the interview. Remember to put the onsite together, and then compete the offer:

• Studying questions: about 1-2 months (on the job, if you have the basics)
• Open LinkedIn and start the interview: After completing the questions, be sure not to accept the interview too early. If you accept the interview too early and then schedule the interview a month later, you will basically not be accepted. The pit will have been filled by others, and the interview with you will be just a formality. The best thing is to meet as soon as possible after contacting you.
• Onsite, after the interview is almost over, try to put the onsite together. For working friends, this is more difficult, but fortunately, after the onsite interview, most companies will take a week to make an offer, and many offers are even pending for 30 days.

My original strategy was to interview the people who flirted with me on LinkedIn, and then start formally interviewing big companies. I never expected that the companies that flirted with me were also very good, and I was lucky enough to be accepted by almost all of them, and the conditions were good in all aspects, which was embarrassing.

Here I want to say something. In fact, the company flirting with you is really short of people, and the probability of them meeting you is high. It's like falling in love, it's always easier to chase someone back than to pursue them.

area

After looking around the country, I found that Washington is really not very good. Although there are some opportunities, compared with other places, the friendliness towards engineers is much different, and it can be said that it is completely uncompetitive. Especially in terms of interview experience, for example, other regions basically don’t mention H1B and green cards. They don’t take them seriously and will give them to someone immediately. However, Washington is still at the stage of not recruiting H1B and not giving green cards.

A few places with better experience: Boston, Seattle, New York, Silicon Valley/Sanfan. Among them, New York and Silicon Valley, I personally feel that the living conditions are relatively difficult. Overall, I gave up on them.

Note: Wayfair in Boston and Amazon across the country are hungry for talent, as you know.

Amazon’s strange experience

I didn’t want to mention it at first, but I just couldn’t help it and wanted to share it. As a leading company, the interview experience was really bad.

I interviewed at Amazon before when I graduated. The onsite interview was obviously very good, but I failed for no reason. This experience was even worse.

First of all, Amazon has one recruiter for each team. You will receive many different Amazon recruiters contacting you. Of course, they will tell you that you can only choose 2 groups at the same time (then don’t you check first before contacting? Is the system blocked?).

I had multiple teams contact me this time, and I made an appointment for an interview with one group, but then there were other groups that I thought were more suitable, and I wanted to change the interview group, but the recruiter said that I would interview the first round first, and then make arrangements after the interview. I think it also makes sense. After all, the first interview is a general interview, and we will talk about it after passing it.

Unexpectedly, it was this first meeting that caused the problem. The person who met me was a San who was 8 minutes late and had a very bad attitude. He seemed to be trying to get rid of me. Then he asked a very simple algorithm question, and I answered it quickly. Then I asked him if he wanted to optimize it, but he said no and didn't ask follow up. Then... he was given a question with unclear meaning. I wanted to ask clearly, but he gave up on his own and said it was okay. Then it was over, and the entire interview took less than 30 minutes (default is 1 hour).

Sure enough, after a few days, I was rejected. I wrote an angry letter to the interviewer and sent it to the recruiter. The recruiter said that there was nothing he could do about it, but he would transfer me to another team.

Recruiters from other groups asked for my available time. I submitted three of them, but they assigned me to other times. I sent emails many times saying that I couldn't interview at the time they arranged, but they didn't reply to me. I was extremely disappointed with Amazon's recruitment process (especially when other companies' processes were very comfortable), so I withdrew angrily.

Once or twice is okay, but three such bad experiences are really unacceptable. Compared to the way other large companies treat candidates, Amazon really needs to improve.